Jack
Ryan's age shouldn't matter. As he
says in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,
he's "just an analyst" for the CIA, not an agent. He's a man of intellect, not of
action. Chris Pine may be the second oldest actor to play the role of Tom
Clancy's semi-iconic character, but he's definitely the most youthful in spirit,
playing Ryan as a happily eager upstart who has qualms about getting involved in
the field. As envisioned by
screenwriters Adam Cozad and David Koepp, this is also the most active
incarnation of the character.

It's an
odd choice, not only because the character's background here doesn't exactly
make his physical feats totally plausible but also because the reliance on
Ryan's abilities to fight well, run fast, and drive like a professional detract
from the very thing that separates him from any other action hero who can do
those things, too. His analytical
skills are reduced to a lengthy monologue just before the climax in which he
orders a bunch of people to search various databases and social networking
websites on computers—a task that seems a lot less impressive and completely
ordinary in this day and age. Technology
hasn't made Ryan completely obsolete, but this franchise reboot doesn't make a
good argument that the character is necessary, either.

The
movie does start with some promise, as a college-age Ryan is at a university in
London when the attacks of September 11, 2001 occur. Two years later, he is a Marine serving in Afghanistan until an RPG
attack on a helicopter nearly kills and almost leaves him paralyzed. He flirts with Cathy (Keira Knightley), a medical student, in physical
therapy and receives some praise for an extracurricular intelligence report he
did in the Marines from Thomas Harper (Kevin Costner), a commander in the Navy
who also works for the CIA. Harper
works for a unit that makes sure the United States is never attacked again, and
10 years later, Ryan is working undercover on Wall Street trying to detect any
sources that may be funding terrorist groups.

The
setup suggests a different kind of Ryan. Here's
a man whose injuries limit him physically. He
still walks with a trace of a limp and does his routine jogs while wearing a
back brace, and those impediments seem to keep him restricted to pleasantries at
an office and examining spreadsheets of accounts, attempting to find strange
transactions. The way Cozad and
Koepp incorporate the ongoing concerns of a post-9/11 world without extreme
fear-mongering (i.e., a nuclear weapon detonating in a major American city, as
in the previous—but still effective—Ryan adventure) feels right, too. It's a subdued framework for the character that places him in a
representation of the world that is far closer to reality than geopolitical
fantasy.

The
illusion of authenticity dissipates rather quickly when the convoluted and only
somewhat clarified plot begins. The
story suggests that, as a character, Ryan can survive a world where any
information one might need is a smartphone away but is doomed to be stuck in a Cold
War mentality.

The
villain is Viktor Cherevin (Kenneth Branagh, who also directed the movie), a
Russian businessman with shadowy ties to the Kremlin and the FSB. His plan is the economic devastation of the United States by doing
something that will result in something else, which will, somehow, devalue the
dollar and cause a second Great Depression. There's also a terrorist attack, involving with a "family" of
sleeper agents in Dearborn, Michigan, at play here, and yes, that inevitably
leads to uncomfortable scenes of people scurrying in fear around the Financial
District in Manhattan and, more conventionally, a bomb with a digital timer as
the target of a car/motorcycle chase.

Ryan is
in Moscow to investigate Cherevin, and upon arriving at his hotel room, he's
shot at and attacked by one of Cherevin's men, leading to a brutal fight and
killing. Later, he must infiltrate
Cherevin's building to download files from the computer system (a cliché that
is now as inescapable as a digital timer on a bomb) and encounters resistance
from guards. Eventually, there's
another car chase through the streets of Moscow with Cathy as a damsel in
distress. Ryan endures a lot of
rough and tumble with no repercussions for a man who experienced such
catastrophic injuries.

These
are entirely generic scenarios, and they gradually overwhelm the movie's more
intriguing elements. Beyond the
initial expository scenes, there is also the strained relationship between Ryan
and Cathy, which is familiar to material like this but has the benefit of a
section during that subplot in which Cathy is a much stronger character than we
might expect (It's in between the parts when she's a jealous nuisance and a
hostage in need of rescuing). It
leads to the movie's best scene—a battle of focused playacting at a fancy
restaurant in which Ryan and Cherevin have to disguise their obvious suspicions
of each other. It's here that Jack
Ryan: Shadow Recruit feels like an improvised game of espionage instead of
merely going through the motions as it is too comfortable to do.